City Council studies term limits

Naperville explores 3-term limit for councilmen elected beginning in 2013

June 18, 2010|By Bob Goldsborough, Special to the Tribune

The Naperville City Council is taking a serious look at placing a measure on the November ballot to limit the number of terms the mayor and council members could serve.

After an hourlong discussion Tuesday, council members voted 7-1 to direct the city's legal staff to draw up a possible referendum question on whether to limit city elected officials to three consecutive terms, beginning with officials elected in April 2013. Council members will review that question at their July 20 meeting. They have till Aug. 29 to place referendum questions on the Nov. 2 ballot.

To be determined is whether any referendum question would affect current council members.

The council's action is in response to recent efforts by the Naperville Voter Education League to gather signatures to place the issue of term limits on November's ballot.

Bill Eagan, chairman of the Naperville Voter Education League, said his group has collected more than 2,000 signatures and expressed strong confidence that it could gather far more than the 8,800 or so signatures necessary to place the referendum question on the ballot, without City Council action. However, on Tuesday night, Eagan pledged that his group would drop its efforts if the council were to commit to placing the issue on the ballot.

Councilmen Grant Wehrli and Kenn Miller cautioned Eagan that Tuesday's vote does not guarantee that they will approve placing such a referendum question on the ballot in November. Only one councilman, Richard Furstenau, expressed opposition to term limits on Tuesday.

"I have not been in favor of term limits all my life, long before I ever got on this council," said Furstenau, who is in his third four-year term. "The longer I'm on the council, the more I'm convinced that we need to not change the terms and limit councilmen on the City Council who want to serve. ... It's important that we have a continuity of people."

Councilman Jim Boyajian, however, said he supports placing the measure on the ballot.

"I don't believe any one of us should be so arrogant to think that we can't be replaced," he said. "While there's an argument for somebody having institutional knowledge, the fact of the matter is institutional knowledge gains at a different pace, depending on the individual."

A few residents affiliated with the Naperville Voter Education League urged council members to give voters the chance to weigh in on term limits.

"You guys are staying in there too long," said Naperville resident Larry Camis. "I would rather have other ones in there to make other decisions, which might be better and might be worse. (But) I would like to have that choice."

Some council members said they wanted to apply any law that voters approved only to individuals who are newly elected in 2013 so that "nobody up here has skin in the game, so to speak," Boyajian said.

City Attorney Margo Ely advised council members not to apply the proposed ordinance retroactively to long-serving council members. Ely told the council that such a law could be written to affect anyone who is elected in 2013, incumbent or not.

Mayor George Pradel, who was absent on Tuesday, is in his fourth term, while Councilman Doug Krause is in his sixth term. Furstenau and Boyajian are in their third terms.

Miller reminded his colleagues that while voters can always vote any council member out of office in the "ultimate referendum," he acknowledged that "incumbents have an edge in any election."